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Some  Cognitive  Elements 
of  Religious  Experience 


By 

1/ 

SAMUEL  H.  FORRER 


Libr*.  o«f  Tre- 1 1  cr . "HK o  14 q:: Vt+" 
JO  O 


BOSTON:  THE  GORHAM  PRESS 

TORONTO  :  THE  COPP  CLARK  CO.,  LIMITED 


Copyright  1917  by  Samuel  H.  Forrer 
All  Rights  Reserved 


Made  in  the  United  States  of  America 


The  Gorham  Press,  Boston,  U.  S.A. 


TO 

THE  OFFICERS  AND  MEMBERS  OF 
PARK  CHURCH,  ERIE,  PENNSYLVANIA 

whose  wise  consideration  affords  their  pastor 
ample  time  for  work  in  the  ''study\  but 
deprives  him  of  all  excuse  for 
inadequate  pulpit  preparation  ^ 
this  book  is  affectionately 
dedicated  • 


# 


\ 


PREFACE 


In  the  preparation  of  this  thesis  I  have  received 
assistance  from  Pres.  Ormond’s  “Lectures  on  an 
Introduction  to  the  Philosophy  of  Religion”,  and  his 
“Basal  Concepts  of  Philosophy”,  Dr.  John  Watson’s 
“Interpretation  of  Religious  Experience”,  the  late 
Prof.  James’  “Varieties  of  Religious  Experience”, 
Prof.  Royce’s  “Problem  of  Christianity”,  and  his 
“Sources  of  Religious  Insight”,  Dinsmore’s  “Atone¬ 
ment  in  Literature  and  Life”,  Fairbairn’s  “Phil¬ 
osophy  of  the  Christian  Religion”,  the  late  Princi¬ 
pal  Caird’s  “Evolution  of  Religion”,  the  late  Prof. 
Bowne’s  “Theism”,  and  Prof.  Hocking’s  “Meaning 
of  God  in  Human  Experience”. 

Samuel  H.  Forrer, 

Erie,  Pennsylvania. 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS  OF 
RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS  OF 
RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

T>  Y  “experience”  we  mean  whatever  is  real  or  sig- 

nificant  to  human  consciousness.  Experience 
is  distinguished  as  religious  by  its  object.  The  ob¬ 
ject  of  religious  experience  is  some  super-human 
power  apprehended  as  Divine.  Religious  experi¬ 
ence  is,  therefore,  some  sort  of  conscious  response  of 
the  spirit  of  man  to  such  a  divine  object. 

Hence  religion  developes  with  experience.  It 
grows,  evolves,  attains.  In  the  course  of  its  evolu¬ 
tion  the  nature  of  man’s  response  to  the  Divine  is 
so  varied  as  to  sweep  the  whole  gamut  of  the  mind’s 
possibilities  from  the  terror  of  the  lowest  superstition 
to  the  concrete  satisfaction  of  the  highest  ration¬ 
ality. 

Religion,  therefore,  must  be  estimated  not  by 
its  origin  but  by  its  successful  completion.  The 
science  of  astronomy  must  not  be  judged  today  by 
the  conception  of  primitive  astrology,  nor  chemistry 
by  the  childish  operations  of  ancient  alchemy.  We 
cannot  go  back  to  the  childhood  of  the  race  for  our 
standards  of  truth.  The  true  nature  of  the  acorn 
is  fully  discernible  only  in  the  oak;  so  the  essen¬ 
tial  character  and  worth  of  religion  is  discernible 
not  in  its  germinative  principle  but  in  its  loftiest 
reaches. 


9 


10 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


In  all  religious  experience  certain  cognitive 
elements  are  essential.  These  cognitive  elements 
are  concretely  cognitive.  The  God  consciousness  is 
a  demand  of  man’s  entire  nature — intellectual, 
moral,  emotional.  It  has  the  warrant  of  the  entire 
soul. 

Many  of  these  cognitive  elements  are  of  course 
only  embryonic  or  merely  implicit  in  the  lower  forms 
of  religion.  Yet  in  these  earliest  stages  religion 
is  a  process  which  involves  concrete  cognition 
— at  first,  no  doubt,  a  sort  of  unreflective  con¬ 
sciousness  which,  in  the  course  of  its  development, 
becomes  reflective  and  therefore,  more  and  more 
able  to  give  a  reason  for  its  existence. 

All  human  knowledge  is  of  necessity  partial. 
Every  truth  runs  backward  and  forward  into  infin¬ 
ity.  Man  has  no  organs  adequate  to  the  full  com¬ 
prehension  of  such  truth.  “The  margin  of  knowl¬ 
edge  fades  forever  and  forever  as  we  move.” 

“Flower  in  the  crannied  wall, 

I  pluck  you  out  of  the  cranny ; — 

Hold  you  here,  root  and  all,  in  my  hand. 

Little  flower — but  if  I  could  understand 
What  you  are,  root  and  all,  and  all  in  all, 

I  should  know  what  God  and  man  is.” 

Limited  as  we  are  by  the  conditions  of  our  sensible 
experience  we  cannot  completely  comprehend  the 
depths  and  riches  of  the  divine  Mind.  “We  know 
in  part.” 

But  as  Prof.  Hocking  says,  “It  is  not  a  true 
account  of  knowledge  to  say  that  it  proceeds 
(always)  from  the  part  to  the  whole.  The  progress 


OF  RELIGIOUS* EXPERIENCE  11 

of  knowledge  has  rather  more  in  common  with  the 
development  of  a  germ  cell  than  with  the  building 
of  a  brick  wall — something  of  the  whole  present  and 
active  in  that  cell  from  the  beginning.  .  .  .  We  do  not 
learn  to  see  space  little  by  little.  The  child’s  space 
is  as  great  as  the  man’s,  namely,  whole  space.  He 
who  comes  into  the  world  at  all  comes  at  once  into 
the  presence  of  the  whole  world.  I  am  introduced 
to  a  person  not  by  piece-meal  but  all  at  once,  with  a 
positive  imipression  and  judgment  contained  in  my 
idea ;  not  denying  that  there  is  much  to  learn  and  cor¬ 
rect  through  long  growing  acquaintance.  So  of 
my  introduction  to  reality:  in  its  full  infinity  and 
wholeness  it  is  now  before  me  and  has  been  so  from 
my  conscious  beginning,  the  same  from  birth  to  death. 

. What  grows  in  knowledge  is  the  understanding 

of  all  this,  the  internal  complexity  and  detail . 

What  grows  in  knowledge  is  growth  of  connection, 
growth  of  treaty-making  between  ideas.” 

Such  growth  is  incomplete.  Hence  our  knowl¬ 
edge  is  incomplete. 

But  human  knowledge  while  partial  in  the  sense 
of  not  embracing  infinity  is  complete  in  the  sense  of 
embracing  reality  to  the  fullness  of  its  finite  grasp. 
An  old  German  proverb  says,  “It  is  provided  that 
the  trees  shall  not  grow  into  the  sky”.  To  which 
Prof.  Caird  adds,  “It  is  equally  provided  that  they 
shall  always  grow  towards  it.”  It  is  a  fundamental 
presupposition  of  all  knowledge  that  the  universe  is 
intelligible  and  all  intelligences  are  identical  in  their 
essential  nature. 


12 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


Reality  is  not  mere  being,  which  is  mere  nothing 
—reached  by  a  complete  abstraction  from  all  par¬ 
ticulars.  Reality  is  the  perfect  unity  which  dif¬ 
ferentiates  itself  through  particulars  in  various  de¬ 
grees  of  self-manifestation.  Hence  to  know  is  to 
include  the  particular  under  the  universal  and  this 
universalized  particular  under  a  higher  universal 
until  the  highest  universal  is  reached  through  which 
all  things  ultimately  must  be  known. 

Thus  we  have  various  stages  of  knowledge, 
but  each  in  its  own  way  embracing  reality.  The 
common  sense  stage  of  knowledge  embraces  isolated 
particulars^  under  the  universals  of  space  and  time. 
The  scientific  stage  discovers  that  there  are  no  iso¬ 
lated  particulars  in  the  universe,  but  certain  inviol¬ 
able  laws  are  the  identities  that  bind  all  particulars 
into  ^  various  unified  spheres  of  knowledge.  The 
religious  stage,  finally,  rising  to  the  highest  universal, 
sees  all  things  in  God”  as  the  unity  manifest  in 
nature  and  human  nature.  Thus  to  know  the 
natural  law  of  the  external  world  or  the  moral  law 
of  the  self  is  to  that  extent  to  know  the  one  Infinite 
Reality  which  is  manifest  at  different  levels  in  both. 

Perhaps  no  student  of  Shakespeare  to-day 
grasps  the  entire  range  of  his  master’s  mind;  yet  to 
the  extent  that  he  does  grasp  it,  to  that  extent  he 
knows  Shakespeare.  So  everything  we  can  learn  of 
^e  finite  is  a  step  in  the  knowledge  of  the  infinite. 
The  mind  of  man  does  not  mistake  cave  shadows  for 
fundamental  actualities;  it  grasps  reality  with  in¬ 
creasing  capacity  and  certitude. 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


13 


There  is  a  certain  analogy  between  the  life  of 
the  individual  and  that  of  the  race.  The  former 
is  a  sort  of  an  epitome  of  the  history  of  the  latter. 
But  in  the  individual  that  history  is  so  abbreviated 
that  its  various  stages  of  development  are  confused. 
The  religious  experience  of  the  race  is  the  exper¬ 
ience  of  the  individual  writ  large,  and  as  Plato 
observed, ^  it  is  by  reading  the  large  letters  that  we 
learn  to  interpret  the  small.  Thus  we  are  led  to 
consider  some  cognitive  elements  in  the  development 
of  the  religious  experience  of  the  race,  in  the  hope 
that  such  an  examination  of  the  macrocosm  will  serve 
to  clarify  our  misunderstanding  of  the  microcosm. 

What  then  are  the  cognitive  elements  in  the  re¬ 
ligious  experience  of  the  race  which  may  be  con¬ 
sidered  fundamentals? 


[ 


^  I  ^  he  first  and  most  fundamental  is  the  conscious 

presence  of  some  super-human  object. 

All  religion  presupposes  a  psychical  subject, 
a  supersensible  object,  and  a  point  of  linkage  between 
the  two.  This  is  religion  at  its  irreducible  minimum. 
This  is  the  common  element  essential  to  the  very 
nature  of  religion.  The  central  problem  of  moral¬ 
ity  is  man’s  agency.  The  central  problem  of  reli¬ 
gion  is  man’s  consiousness  of  God. 

The  savage  with  his  taboo,  totem  or  fetich, 
recognizes  the  supersensible.  His  world  is  full  of 
ghosts  and  gods.  His  rabbit’s  foot  or  bead  or  stick 
or  stone  has  its  hidden  deity.  From  lowest  savag¬ 
ery  to  highest  civilization  man’s  life  moves  under  the 
influence  of  ideas  that  root  in  a  recognized  spiritual 
'  realm  above  him. 

“There  are  powers,  we  think,  beyond  seeing 
and  hearing,  on  whom  we  depend,  to  whom  we  owe 
various  duties,  and  who  take  note  of  our  life  and  con¬ 
duct  j  and  our  relation  to  these  powers  is  the  deepest 
and  highest  and  most  solemn  element  in  our  exis¬ 
tence.’’  Bowne. 

Herodotus  said  that  in  his  travels  he  had  found 
cities  without  walls,  without  schools,  without  temples 

of  justice,  but  never  a  city  without  an  altar  of 
worship. 

Hence  Prof.  James,  after  a  careful  scientific 
investigation  of  the  “Varieties  of  Religious  Exper- 


14 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


15 


ience”,  concludes  that  man  everywhere  has  discov¬ 
ered  that  he  lives  in  the  presence  of  the  Divine. 

There  are  certain  supposed  exceptions  among 
the  religions  of  the  earth  to  this  reign  of  the  reli¬ 
gious  consciousness,  viz :  fetichism,  which  is  regarded 
as  pure  idolatry;  Buddhism,  Humanism,  Naturalism, 
which  are  denominated  atheistic;  and  Confucianism, 
which  is  called  a  mere  system  of  ethics. 

In  refutation,  however,  of  these  suggested  ex¬ 
ceptions,  it  need  only  be  observed,  as  to  the  first 
exception,  that  the  fetich  is  not  a  mere  stick  or  stone, 
but  a  symbol  of  a  supersensible  presence  related  to 
the  savage  either  for  good  or  evil. 

Of  course  the  immaturity  of  the  savage  state 
renders  a  clear  idea  of  the  nature  of  that  super¬ 
natural  Presence  impossible.  The  savage  may  con¬ 
ceive  his  god  as  the  magic  which  dwells  in  a  rabbit’s 
foot,  or  as  the  mysterous  power  which  resides  in 
some  beast — cat  or  bull;  or  in  some  person — medi¬ 
cine-man  or  wizard;  but  however  he  conceives  the 
supernatural,  it  is  as  real  a  deity  to  him  as  was  Jeho¬ 
vah  to  Israel. 

Buddhism  was  originally  based  on  atheism. 
But  the  atheism  was  the  recoil  of  the  soul  of  man 
from  a  God  regarded  as  purely  objective  to  the  op¬ 
posite  extreme  wherein  He  was  regarded  as  purely 
subjective.  Such  extreme  movements  of  the  pendu¬ 
lum  of  faith  mark  the  progress  of  human  thought 
from  stage  to  stage.  Thus  the  different  religions 
emphasize  different  factors  of  religious  experience 
at  different  periods  of  its  development.  But  though 
Buddhism  swung  from  a  purely  objective  God  to  the 


1 6  SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 

recognition  of  no  God  at  all,  yet  this  situation  was 
of  temporary  endurance.  The  religious  conscious¬ 
ness  soon  asserted  its  rights  and  the  Buddha  was 
idealized  and  deified  to  occupy  a  position  in  Bud¬ 
dhism  similar  to  that  occupied  by  the  Christ  in 
Christianity.  Thus  he  becomes  the  supersensible 
presence  in  the  Buddhistic  consciousness. 

Confucianism  was  originally  a  pure  system  of 
morality  based  on  human  relations.  As  such  it  was 
not  a  religion  at  all.  But  this  system  of  mere  ethics 
soon  became  the  religion  of  China.  How  was  this 
elevation  attained?  The  central  object  of  the  Con- 
fucian  ethics  was  the  family  ancestor.  When  the 
Chinese  mind  discovered  the  inadequacy  of  a  system 
of  morality  which  separated  man  from  the  divine 
presence  and  help,  it  proceeded  to  deify  the  family 
ancestor.  Thus  Confucianism  became  a  religion  of 
ancestor  worship. 

From  the  days  of  Democritus  Naturalism  has 
attempted  to  explain  the  order  of  the  universe  by 
efficient  causation.  It  eliminates  the  supernatural. 
But  Naturalism  remains  powerless  to  evoke  religious 
emotion  until  it  deifies  its  world.  Thus  it  substi¬ 
tutes  the  universe  for  God. 

Auguste  Comte  founded  a  school  of  thought 
based  on  “positive”  scientific  knowledge  of  facts. 
It  was  to  supplant  theology  and  metaphysics.  The 
supersensible  was  to  be  eliminated.  “Comte  led 
God  to  the  confines  of  the  universe  and  bowed  Him 
out.”  Comte’s  religion  was  to  be  a  pure  “Human¬ 
ism;”  but  his  deeper  nature  rebelled,  and  before  his 
death  he  had  established  a  church  of  his  own  with 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


17 


its  calendar  of  saints,  its  sacred  days,  its  catechism, 
its  Sabbath  and  its  God.  Humanity  was  deified  and 
worshipped  under  the  symbol  of  Comte’s  wife. 

Thus  in  the  hour  of  revolt  individual  men 
may  break  with  religion  and  deny  the  divine  Pre¬ 
sence.  But  such  revolt  is  merely  the  “Soul’s  tem¬ 
porary  aberration  from  the  normal  of  its  true  orbit”. 
The  religious  consciousness  will  reassert  its  rights 
and  man  will  recognize  God  or  find  some  substitute 
to  do  business  in  His  stead. 

What  is  the  origin  of  man’s  faith  in  the  super¬ 
natural?  How  is  the  divine  object  linked  to  the 
psychical  subject?  In  other  words,  what  is  the 
origin  of  religion? 

Superficial  students,  hostilely  inclined  toward 
religion,  have  regarded  it  as  an  imposition  upon 
human  credulity  by  the  art  and  device  of  king  or 
priest.  But  until  human  ingenuity  can  contrive  some 
process  whereby  to  insert  the  persistent  love  and 
practice  of  art  into  an  inartistic  temparament,  or  to 
instill  rationality  into  an  irrational  creature  the  the¬ 
ory  of  an  external  imposition  of  religion  upon  an 
irreligious  being  remains  unworthy  of  serious  con¬ 
sideration. 

The  origin  of  religion  is  not  external  but  in¬ 
ternal  to  the  mind  itself.  A  mind  without  consti¬ 
tutional  need  or  tendency  has  no  point  of  contact 
with  anything  without.  Nothing  can  be  imported 
into  the  mind  from  without.  The  source  of  religion 
must,  therefore,  be  sought  within  the  mind. 

Many  internal  origins  of  religion  have  been 
suggested,  such  as  the  fear  of  timid  and  helpless 


1 8  SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 

souls,  the  dreams  of  hungry  or  gorged  savages,  the 
hallucinations  of  diseased  minds,  the  weird  tricks 
of  magic  and  sorcery,  and  so  on  ad  infinitum.  From 
such  sources  the  world  is  peopled  with  mysterious 
presences — projections  of  the  mind’s  own  states  of 
consciousness. 

The  objection  to  all  such  suggested  origins  of 
religion  is  that  they  confuse  the  religious  conscious¬ 
ness  with  its  historical  expressions.  They  lay  the 
axe  not  at  the  root  but  at  the  fruit  of  the  tree. 

To  sketch  certain  characteristic  features  of 
religion  at  the  time  of  Its  earliest  historic  expression 
is  very  different  from  a  study  of  religion  as  a  living 
thing,  growing  in  Its  native  soil.  Influenced  by  all  the 
forces  that  play  upon  It  and  manifesting  character¬ 
istic  features  at  the  various  stages  of  development. 

The  source  of  religion  Is  deeper  than  the  earli¬ 
est  expression  of  religion.  Man  is  fundamentally 
religious.  He  did  not  wander  Into  the  religious 
realm  but  grew  Into  It  and  It  grew  In  him  and  with 
him.  He  Is  a  creature  of  the  most  high  God  and 
In  his  primary  consciousness  the  creature  meets  and 
greets  the  Creator.  The  human  spirit  in  Its  awak¬ 
ing  consciousness  salutes  the  Divine. 

Hence  man  Is  as  truly  a  religious  animal  as  he 
is  a  rational  animal.  He  does  not  get  reason  from 
without;  he  is  constitutionally  rational.  But  he  can 
no  more  choose  to  be  religious  than  he  can  choose 
to  be  rational;  he  is  both  by  the  same  necessity  of 
nature. 

By  the  very  constitution  of  his  mind  man  lives 
at  once  In  three  worlds;  the  world  without,  the  world 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


19 


within,  and  the  world  above.  His  linkage  to  the 
world  without  we  may  call,  in  the  language  of  Hegel, 
his  sensuous  consciousness;  to  the  world  within  his 
self  consciousness;  to  the  world  above,  his  religious 
consciousness.  These  three  are  one  fundamentally 
and  in  the  normal  life  develope  together — a  sort  of 
trinity  in  unity.  They  are  all  necessarily  present 
even  though  only  implicit,  in  the  earliest  or  lowest 
forms  of  human  consciousness. 

A  being  whose  nature  is  exhausted  in  sense 
objects  can  never  transcend  them.  The  stone  or  shell 
to  him  must  be  a  stone  or  shell,  never  a  fetich. 
Without  the  religious  instinct  man  could  no  more 
rise  above  the  sense  object  to  the  religious  object 
than  can  the  dog  or  the  horse.  Hence  we  say  it 
is  not  something  without  but  the  primary  conscious¬ 
ness  within  the  man  and  behind  his  creed  and  ritual 
to  which  the  origin  of  religion  must  be  ascribed. 
The  religious  consciousness  links  man  to  the  divine 
Being  who  is  the  source  of  all  existence  and  knowl¬ 
edge  and  in  whom  all  finite  subjects  and  finite  objects 
“live  and  move  and  have  their  being”. 

We  have  no  organ  by  which  to  know  the  ex¬ 
istence  of  other  spiritual  realities.  How  then  do 
we  know  that  other  beings  with  minds  like  our  own 
exist?  The  reality  of  our  social  world  is  the  last 
thing  we  should  doubt.  There  is  nothing  more  cer¬ 
tain  to  us  than  the  existence  of  other  spirits  like 
ourselves;  yet  we  have  no  organ  of  knowledge  by 
which  to  determine  such  existence.  “In  the  nature 
of  the  case,”  says  Prof.  Hocking,  “It  could  hardly 
be  otherwise;  the  other  mind  must  be  beyond  my 


20 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


powers  of  direct  experience.  It  can  be  no  object 
of  sensation;  because  it  is  not  a  physical  thing.  It 
must  be  such  as  I  am,  a  thinker  of  its  objects,  not  an 
object  among  objects;  and  as  such  thinker,  or  subject, 
it  can  only  be  thought  not  sensed”. 

We  cannot  see  or  handle  existence  but  must 
feel  it  by  some  general  sense  which  has  no  organ. 
Thus  the  ultimate  test  of  reality  becomes  what  the 
psychologists  call  the  “reality  feeling”.  It  is  an  im¬ 
mediate  contact  and  insight. 

Such  is  the  inarticulate  character  of  all  our  deep¬ 
est  sources  of  religious  knowledge.  Down  in  the 
depths  of  the  soul  whence  rises  the  primary  con¬ 
sciousness  of  self,  spring  simultaneously  the  social 
consciousness  and  the  religious.  Thus  man  is  born  a 
potentially  social  and  religious  being  quite  as  cer¬ 
tainly  as  a  potentially  self-conscious  being. 

Man’s  religious  instinct  may  embody  itself  in 
grotesque  and  gruesome  forms.  He  may  “worship 
and  serve  the  creature  rather  than  the  Creator.” 
He  may  obscure  by  sin  the  divine  image  upon  his 
soul.  But  he  cannot  take  even  the  wings  of  the 
morning  and  fly  away  from  his  religious  intuition. 
It  is  as  utterly  impossible  for  one  to  rid  himself  of 
his  religious  consciousness  as  it  would  be  to  rid 
himself  of  his  social  or  his  self-consciousness  and 
yet  remain  normal.  Atheism  in  the  form  of 
eliminating  from  human  consciousness  the  sense  of 
the  transcendent  is  a  mental  impossibility.  Athe¬ 
ism  is  possible  only  as  a  protest  against  some  accept¬ 
ed  conception  of  the  Divine  in  favor  of  what  the 
atheist  feels  to  be  a  more  satisfying  conception. 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


V 


21 


However  the  religious  consciousness  survives  as  long 
as  the  normal  mind  survives. 

“There  is  no  unbelief; 

Whoever  plants  a  seed  beneath  the  sod 
And  waits  to  see  it  push  away  the  clod, 

He  trusts  in  God. 

“Whoever  says,  ‘The  clouds  are  in  the  sky. 

Be  patient,  heart,  light  breaketh  by  and  by,’ 

Trusts  the  Most  High. 

“Whoever  sees,  ‘neath  winter’s  wealth  of  snow 
The  silent  harvest  of  the  future  grow, 

God’s  power  must  know. 

“Whoever  says,  ‘Tomorrow,  the  Unknown, 

The  Future,  trusts  the  power  alone 
He  dares  disown.’’ 

Thus  man  clings  to  the  existence  of  other  spiritual 
beings  like  himself  and  to  the  existence  of  the  divine 
Being  not  because  he  can  prove  such  existence  by 
logical  processes,  but  even  If  he  cannot  prove  it. 
Religion  does  not  rest  on  proof,  but  underlies  and 
antedates  all  rational  attempts  at  proof. 

A  being  without  the  religious  Instinct  could 
never  be  made  religious  by  any  multiplicity  of  ra¬ 
tional  proofs  of  the  existence  of  God.  Extract  from 
man  the  primary  religious  consciousness  that  links 
him  to  the  Divine  in  the  Immediacy  of  fellowship 
and  the  rational  proofs  may  prop  up  above  the  soil 
an  Imaginary  religious  twig,  but  they  can  never  trans- 
from  it  into  a  vital  organism  that  sends  Its  roots 


22 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


downward  into  the  subsoil  of  the  soul  and  its  branch¬ 
es  upward  toward  God.  But  with  the  that  of  the  di¬ 
vine  existence  firmly  established  in  the  primary  con¬ 
sciousness  of  man,  then  reason  as  it  awakens  and 
developes  expresses  itself  in  more  and  more  elabor¬ 
ate  systems  of  rationality,  not  only  as  to  the  that  but 
especially  as  to  the  what  of  the  existence  of  God. 
Thus  reason  is  not  asked  to  do  the  impossible,  but 
to  do  what  it  can,  and  in  this  realm  its  work  is  recog¬ 
nized  to  be  indispensible. 

In  the  wake  of  a  developing  rationality  man 
rises  from  the  fear  of  the  purely  transcendent  object 
symbolized  in  the  fetich  of  savages  to  the  love  and 
worship  of  God  the  Father  Almighty  as  revealed 
in  the  Christian  religion.  So  from  the  lowest  sav¬ 
agery  up  to  the  highest  civilization  man  in  his  reli¬ 
gious  consciousness  recognizes  the  presence  of  some 
supernatural  power. 

The  late  Alfred  Russell  Wallace,  co-discoverer 
with  Darwin  of  the  law  of  Evolution,  sums  up  the 
work  of  his  life  in  a  great  book  which  he  calls,  “The 
World  of  Life”.  The  thought  of  this  great  scien¬ 
tist  is  that  the  whole  Universe  is  out  upon  an  upward 
march  under  the  directive  influence  of  an  infinite 
Intelligence.  The  most  wonderful  chapter  in  the 
book  is  that  on  the“Mystery  of  the  Cell”.  This 
little  cell,  the  earliest  form  of  life,  with  its  central 
nucleus,  suddenly  moves  and  there  is  a  mechanical 
movem'ent,  a  chemical  movement  and  a  vital  move¬ 
ment.  “Under  the  microscope  it  seems  perfectly 
clear  that  the  cell  is  moving  under  a  directive  Power. 
So  wonderful  are  the  movements  of  the  cell  that  one 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


23 


is  smitten  with  awe  and  adoration  as  was  Moses 
when  he  uncovered  in  the  presence  of  the  burning 
bush.” 

Whence  has  this  cell  the  power  to  embroider 
the  hillsides  with  violets,  the  valley  with  corn  and 
the  mountains  with  pine  and  hemlock?  Whence  its 
power  to  build  the  birds  of  the  air,  the  cattle  upon 
a  thousand  hills,  and  the  brains  of  a  Socrates  and 
an  Aristotle?  There  is  a  power  in  the  world,  not 
itself,  that  makes  one  cell  to  become  a  thousand 
and  two  cells  to  become  ten  thousand,  until  plant  and 
animal  life  rises  rank  above  rank,  class  by  class, 
family  by  family,  till  man  stands  forth  under  the 
stars,  answering  with  song  and  prayer  and  worship 
the  overtures  of  the  infinite  God!  The  essential 
conclusion  drawn  by  Prof.  Wallace  from  his  study 
of  the  “World  of  Life”  is  the  presence  throughout 
the  universe  of  “A  Creative  Power,  a  Directive 
Mind  and  an  Ultimate  Purpose”. 

So  also  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  says,  “There  will 
remain  one  absolute  certainty,  that  man  is  ever  in  the 
presence  of  an  Infinite  and  Eternal  Energy,  from 
which  all  things  proceed.” 

Fisk  says  that  Spencer’s  Eternal  Energy  must 
be  thought  of  as  self-conscious,  self  active  spirit. 
All  experience  certifies  that  spirit  and  not  matter 
is  creative.  The  mind  cannot  stop  short  of  that. 
So  he  reminds  us  of  Goethe’s  words  put  into  the 
mouth  of  Faust  when  walking  in  the  garden  with 
Marguerite  who  asked  him  if  he  believes  in  God. 
Faust  replies,  in  substance,  so  long  as  the  tranquil 
dome  of  heaven  is  raised  above  our  heads,  and  the 


24  SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 

blossom-set  earth  is  spread  forth  beneath  our  feet, 
while  the  everlasting  stars  course  in  their  mighty 
orbits,  and  the  lover  gazes  with  delight  into  the  eyes 
of  her  who  loves  him,  so  long  must  our  hearts  go 
out  to  Him  who  made  the  heavens  and  the  earth. 

Thus  man’s  consciousness  of  the  presence  of 
the  Divine  appears  to  be  a  fundamental  cognitive  ele¬ 
ment  in  his  religious  experience  in  all  stages  of  his 
development. 


II 


A  NOTHER  such  element  in  man’s  religious  ex- 
^  ^perience  is  his  conscious  spiritual  disharmony 
in  relation  to  the  divine  Being. 

Doubtless  this  sense  of  disharmony  is  much 
more  pronounced  in  some  types  of  religion  than  in 
others.  The  late  Prof.  William  James  separates 
religion  into  two  great  types :  the  religion  of 
“healthy-mindedness”  and  the  religion  of  “soul-sick¬ 
ness.” 

The  religion  of  the  healthy-minded  is  optimistic. 
It  responds  to  the  appeal  of  the  divine  goodness. 
Its  God  is  the  impersonation  of  kindness  and  beauty. 
It  reads  His  character,  not  in  the  disordered  world 
of  man,  but  in  the  romantic  and  harmonious  world 
of  nature.  This  is  the  religion  of  the  one-story  life, 
the  once-born,  the  single-self.  Such  a  soul  has  no  ex¬ 
alted  sense  of  divine  holiness;  therefore,  no  deep 
sense  of  sin  in  his  own  life  or  in  that  of  the  race. 
He  does  not  deny  evil  absolutely,  but  minimizes  it, 
and  his  atonement  for  sin  is  as  mild  as  his  conception 
of  the  disease.  Such  religion  does  not  recognize  a 
Redeemer  so  much  as  a  Revealer  of  God  and  an 
Ideal. 

While  this  type  of  religion  must  be  considered 
genuine.  It  must  at  the  same  time  be  considered 
superficial.  It  borders  very  close  upon  that  Irreligi¬ 
ous  realm  of  self  assertion  which  so  exalts  man  that 
If  he  sees  God  at  all  he  must  look  downwards. 


25 


26 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


But  even  healthy-mindedness,  so  long  as  it  remains 
religious,  recognizes,  however  slightly,  its  dishar¬ 
mony  with  the  divine  perfection. 

Over  against  this  optimistic  religious  type 
stands  that  of  the  sick-soul.  It  is  pessimistic.  It  res¬ 
ponds  to  the  thought  of  the  divine  holiness  and  per¬ 
fection.  “Thou  art  of  purer  eyes  than  to  behold 
evil,  and  must  not  look  upon  iniquity”.  “Holy, 
Holy,  Holy,  Lord  God  Almighty,  which  was  and  is 
and  is  to  come”.  “The  very  heavens  are  unclean 
in  thy  sight”. 

This  type  of  religion  magnifies  the  fragmentari¬ 
ness  and  failure  of  human  life.  The  soul  is  sick. 
“The  whole  head  is  sick  and  the  whole  heart  faint. 
From  the  sole  of  the  feet  even  unto  the  head  there 
is  no  soundness  in  it.”  There  is  need  of  a  physician. 

In  this  religious  type  we  find  the  most  exalted 
conception  of  the  divine  holiness,  the  most  profound 
conviction  of  sin  and  the  deepest  sense  of  the  need 
of  salvation.  A  terrible  disease  demands  heroic 
treatment.  Hence  in  the  religious  experience  of 
sick-souls,  divided-selves,  are  to  be  found  the  cases 
of  sudden  conversion.  This  is  the  religion  of  the 
twice  born. 

The  religious  consciousness  in  both  these  types 
rests  upon  the  idea  of  God  as  the  absolutely  perfect 
Being.  In  such  a  presence  man  necessarily  becomes 
more  or  less  aware  of  his  own  immaturity,  weakness 
and  sinfulness.  The  presence  of  perfection  reveals 
imperfection.  The  line  looks  straight  until  the 
straight  edge  is  placed  against  it.  The  angle  looks 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


27 


perfect  until  the  square  is  applied.  The  wall  ap¬ 
pears  true  until  the  plumb  line  is  hung. 

So  John  the  Baptist  in  the  presence  of  the 
Scribes  and  Pharisees  could  say,  “Ye  generation  of 
vipers,  who  warned  you  to  flee  from  the  wrath  to 
come?”  But  when  he  stood  in  the  presence  of  the 
Master  of  men  he  saw  himself  in  the  presence  of 
such  perfection  that  he  said,  “I  am  not  worthy  to 
stoop  down  and  unloose  the  latchet  of  thy  shoes”. 

Simon  Peter  disputed  with  other  disciples  as 
to  his  being  the  greatest  man  in  the  kingdom  of  his 
Lord.  He  had  “left  all”  to  follow  Jesus  and  as  a  re¬ 
ward  desired  to  be  secretary  of  State  in  his 
earthly  kingdom.  To  the  Master  he  said,  “Tho  all 
others  forsook  thee,  yet  will  not  P’.  Peter  had  an  ex¬ 
alted  sense  of  his  own  self  importance.  But  when  in  a 
great  moment  of  revelation  he  caught  a  glimpse  of 
the  real  character  in  whose  presence  he  stood,  he 
fell  upon  his  facce  at  the  Master’s  feet,  crying,  “De¬ 
part  from  me  Lord,  I  am  a  sinful  man”. 

Isaiah  was  court-preacher  to  king  Uzziah. 
One  morning  he  found  crepe  upon  the  palace  door, 
the  guards  moving  softly  about,  and  the  whole  king¬ 
dom  in  mourning.  Death  had  entered  the  palace 
and  laid  his  icy  fingers  on  the  king’s  wrist  and  said, 
“Come  with  me.”  The  great  monarch  bowed  his 
head  and  departed.  In  that  hour  Isaiah  saw  the 
weakness  of  human  strength.  But  he  saw  some¬ 
thing  else.  “In  the  year  that  King  Uzziah  died  I 
saw  the  Lord  sitting  upon  a  throne  high  and  lifted 
up.”  King  Uzziah  is  dead  but  the  King  of  Kings 
lives  and  reigns.  “Above  him  stood  the  seraphim.... 


28 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


and  one  cried  unto  another  and  said,  “Holy,  holy, 
holy,  is  Jehovah  of  hosts.”  In  the  light  of  that 
perfect  holiness  Isaiah  saw  himself  and  cried,  “Woe 

is  me  I . because  I  am  a  man  of  unclean  lips 

. for  ntine  eyes  have  seen  the  king,  Jehovah  of 

hosts.”  Such  a  vision  of  God  is  always  followed 
by  an  abasement  of  self. 

Job  was  remarkably  conceited  in  behalf  of  his 
own  personal  righteousness.  But  when  he  caught 
the  vision  of  the  purity  and  perfection  of  God, 
seeing  himself  in  the  light  of  that  vision,  he  cried, 
“I  had  heard  of  thee  by  the  hearing  of  the  ear,  but 
now  mine  eye  seeth  Thee;  wherefore  I  abhor  myself 
and  repent  in  dust  and  ashes.” 

This  religious  consciousness,  though  in  an  un¬ 
developed  form,  is  found  in  even  the  lowest  races  of 
mankind,  and  indeed  is  inseparable  from  the  con¬ 
sciousness  of  self.  Over  against  the  divine  ideal 
stands  the  human  real.  The  conscious  disharmony 
between  what  man’s  life  is  and  what  in  his  luminous 
moments  he  sees  that  it  ought  to  be  gives  existence 
to  humanity’s  universal  sense  of  need,  and  conse¬ 
quent  cry  for  salvation.  Man  has  missed  the 
mark,  the  true  end  of  his  life.  Knowing  the  better 
he  has  willed  the  worse.  Hence  he  has  “sinned  and 
come  short  of  the  glory  of  God.” 

In  many  cases,  in  the  higher  stages  of  religious 
experience,  this  sense  of  guilt  assumes  the  attitude 
of  an  overmastering  assurance  of  God’s  condemna¬ 
tion.  “Your  sins  have  separated  between  you  and 
vour  God  and  vour  iniquities  have  hid  His  face 
from  you  that  He  will  not  hear  you.”  Adam  was 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


29 


not  so  much  an  individual  as  a  type  when,  having  sin¬ 
ned,  he  slunk  away  to  hide  himself  among  the  trees 
of  the  garden  when  he  felt  that  God  was  drawing 
nigh.  Goodness  loves  the  light.  Innocence  fol¬ 
lows  the  sun.  But  guilt  hies  away  into  the  dark¬ 
ness. 

When  the  child  fears  the  parent  either  he  is 
an  unlovely  parent  or  else  the  child  is  guilty.  In  the 
latter  case  the  object  of  dread  is  not  the  loving  parent 
but  the  creature  of  the  child’s  own  guilty  imagina¬ 
tion.  Guilt  has  separated  the  child  from  a  true 
vision  of  the  parent.  When  I  detect  God’s  glory 
in  the  world  and  trace  His  handiwork  in  field  and 
flower;  when  I  recognize  His  voice  in  conscience  and 
feel  the  power  of  His  love  in  my  heart,  there  is 
society  where  none  intrudes.”  But  sin’s  work  is 
to  separate  from  God,  and  if  in  the  sea  and  sky,  if 
in  conscience  and  heart,  if  in  the  Cross  of  the  Christ 
if  in  all  these,  I  see  and  hear  no  God,  then  sin’s 
separations  from  God  are  in  me  complete.  My  eyes 
have  been  blinded  and  like  another  prodigal  I  am 
separated  from  my  Father’s  house  to  feed  my  life 
on  husks. 

In  other  cases  when  man’s  guilt  involves  social 
alliances  his  consciousness  emphasizes  his  condition, 
not  so  much  as  a  sinner  against  God  but  rather  as 
an  enemy  of  all  nature  and  a  social  outcast.  “Cur¬ 
sed  art  thou  from  the  ground,  which  hath  opened 
its  mouth  to  receive  thy  brother’s  blood  from  thy 

hand . A  fugitive  and  a  wanderer  shalt  thou 

be  in  the  earth.  Such  was  the  guilty  consciousness 
of  the  murderer  Cain.  The  very  ground  curses  him. 


30 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


Nature  is  against  him.  There  is  a  power  at  the  very 
heart  of  the  universe  that  makes  for  righteousness. 
“From  the  heavens  fought  the  stars,  from  their 
courses  they  fought  against  Sisera.”  All  the  forces 
of  the  universe  are  arrayed  against  him  who  lives 
unworthily. 

When  Israel  forsakes  Jehovah  and  turns  to 
idols.”  “Carmel  languishes  and  Lebanon  mourns.” 
“The  whole  creation  groans  and  languishes  together 
in  pain.”  Nature  grows  duller  and  poorer  as  we 
grow  worse.  We  impress  ourselves  upon  the  uni¬ 
verse  and  read  into  nature  the  story  of  our  hearts. 
When  Lorenzo  and  Jessica  make  love  every  star 
in  heaven  sings  like  an  angel.  When  Julius  Caesar 
is  about  to  be  assassinated  the  night  is  full  of  wild 
alarm  and  portent.  When  LeaFs  agony  reaches 
its  climax  and  he  is  sightless  and  outcast  and  goaded 
to  madness,  nature  is  in  agony  and  there  are  thunder- 
ings  and  lightenings  and  turmoil  and  uproar  in  the 
elements.  Nature  echoes  the  emotions  of  the  human 
heart.  Hence  the  guilty  conscience  casts  a  baleful 
shadow  over  the  face  of  nature. 

Before  Queen  Guinevere  came  and  sinned,  the 
land  was  alive  with  spiritual  presences.  Their  songs 
were  heard  and  their  lights  were  seen  “far  into  the 
rich  heart  of  the  west.”  In  every  cavern  dwelt 
some  little  elf  making  music  like  that  of  a  distant 
horn.  As  the  knight,  pure  and  true,  rode  through 
the  forest  on  his  way  to  Camelot,  “Himself  beheld 
three  spirits,  mad  with  joy,  come  dashing  down  on 
a  tall  wayside  flower.”  All  nature  pulsated  with 
spiritual  life.  Then  came  Guinevere  and  sinned  and 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


31 


fell.  Now  the  light  and  the  joy  and  the  music  are 
withdrawn.  Beacons  disappear,  caves  are  deserted. 
The  forests  are  cheerless  and  desolate.  Such  is  the 
essential  connection  between  nature  and  human  na- 
ture.  Tennyson,  the  poet-philosopher,  sees  that 
life  is  less  abundant,  and  the  forest  less  fragrant, 
and  music  less  sweet,  because  of  the  discord  intro¬ 
duced  by  the  guilt  of  Guinevere.  The  great  reinforc- 
ing  powers  of  the  spiritual  world  are  excluded  and 
exiled  from  nature  and  human  life  by  wrong  doing. 

But  man’s  consciousness  of  guilt  may  lay  great¬ 
est  stress  upon  his  separation  from  his  fellowmen. 
“A  fugitive  and  a  wanderer  shalt  thou  be  in  the 
earth.  Ihe  physically  unclean  and  diseased  were 
separated  from  the  congregation  of  Israel.  “All 
the  days  wherein  the  plague  shall  be  in  him  he  shall 
be  defiled,  he  is  unclean,  he  shall  dwell  alone,  with¬ 
out  the  camp  shall  his  habitation  be”.  But  moral 
leprosy  separates  more  unerringly  between  the  clean 

and  the  unclean.  “What  communion  hath  Christ 
with  Belial?” 

Men  talk  about  “social  vices”.  All  vice  is 
anti-social.  It  separates  man  from  man.  It  drives 
Judas  from  the  society  of  Jesus  into  the  night.  But 
does  not  Judas  find  in  the  darkness  a  comradeship 
that  suits  him  better?  He  seems  to  do  so  for  a 
little  while.  But  soon  he  is  seen  standing  on  the 
cliff  that  overlooks  the  field  of  Aceldama.  He  is 
the  picture  of  completed  despair.  Where  now  is  his 
comradeship  of  darkness?  Where  now  those  friends 
of  the  night  who  bargained  with  him  amid  flattery 
and  frolic  to  betray  his  ideal  ?  That  comradeship 


32 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


has  perished  already.  Any  friendship  founded  on 
crime  is  as  unsubstantial  and  as  unenduring  as  the 
ladder  in  Jacob’s  dream— it  vanishes  when  the  cat¬ 
nap  ends.  Sooner  or  later  vice  will  grind  society 
to  dust.  Secular  historians  like  Gibbons  trace  the 
downfall  of  nations  to  the  disintegrations  wrought 
by  sin.  Thus  Egypt  perished,  and  Babylon  decayed 
and  Greece  rotted  at  the  heart,  and  Rome  was  guilty 
of  spiritual  suicide,  and  Spain  lost  the  sense  of  rev¬ 
erence  and  forgot  God  and  her  glory  departed. 
“Whatsoever  a  man  soweth  that  shall  he  also  reap.” 
Hell  is  the  harvest  of  an  evil  life.  There  is  no 
chasm  so  deep  and  no  barrier  so  high  between  man 
and  man  as  that  which  is  caused  by  sin.  It  separated 
Cain  from  Abel  by  the  chasm  of  death.  Then  it 
separated  Cain  from  the  society  of  his  fellows  to  be 
“a  fugitive  and  a  wanderer  in  the  earth.”  Thus  the 
record  of  sin  from  the  beginning  of  the  race  is  that 
of  the  sundering  of  the  bonds  of  brotherhood  be¬ 
tween  man  and  man. 

This  truth  Coleridge  developes  dramatically  in 
his  “Ancient  Mariner”.  The  seas  were  calm  and 
the  voyage  prosperous  until  the  mariner  slew  with 
his  cross-bow  the  innocent  and  beautiful  Albatross. 
Thus  he  disturbs  through  wanton  cruelty  the  har¬ 
mony  of  the  universe.  Sin  enters  his  Eden,  des¬ 
troying  its  beauty  through  the  introduction  of  death. 
Now  the  mariner  awakens  to  the  consciousness  that 
all  nature  is  against  him. 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


33 


“Down  dropped  the  breeze, 

The  sails  dropped  down ; 

*  *  * 

Day  after  day,  day  after  day 
We  stuck,  nor  breath,  nor  motion; 

As  idle  as  a  painted  ship 
Upon  a  painted  ocean. 

Water,  water  everywhere 
And  all  the  boards  did  shrink. 

Water,  water  everywhere. 

Nor  any  drop  to  drink.” 

But  worse  than  the  enmity  of  nature  is  the  curse  of 
his  fellows.  He  had  wrought  their  ruin;  and  “they 
leave  him  alone  with  the  nightmare  life  and  death 

of  utter  solitude”.  The  lifeless  bodies  of  his  crew 
lay  all  about  him. 

“The  many  men,  so  beautiful ! 

And  they  all  dead  did  lie: 

And  a  thousand,  thousand  slimy  things 
Lived  on;  and  so  did  I.” 

The  slain  albatross,  symbol  of  his  sin,  hangs  about 
his  neck.  He  tries  to  pray.  His  heart  is  as  dry 
as  dust.^^  The  prayer  fails.  The  curse  of  his  guilt 
IS  to  be  “alone  on  a  wide,  wide  sea”,  separated  from 
God  and  his  fellows. 

Thus  man  s  awaking  consciousness  soon  dis¬ 
covers  that  there  is  something  wrong  within  himself, 
and  that  his  salvation  hinges  upon  his  making  proper 
adjustments  to  the  higher  Power.  Along  with  the 


34 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


wrong  part  man  is  aware  of  a  better  part  within 
him,  even  though  this  is  but  a  mere  germ.  In  seek¬ 
ing  deliverance  from  the  wrong  “he  becomes  con¬ 
scious  that  the  higher  part  Is  conterminous  and  con¬ 
tinuous  with  a  more  of  the  same  quality,  which  is  op¬ 
erative  in  the  universe  outside  of  him  and  which  he 
can  keep  In  working  touch  with,  and  In  a  fashion,  get 
on  board  of  and  save  himself  when  all  his  lower  being 
has  gone  to  pieces  In  the  wreck.”  Hence  the  uni¬ 
versal  prevalence  of  altars  and  sacrifices,  prayers 
and  propitiations,  by  which  man  seeks  to  pass  from 
a  condition  of  wrongness  Into  one  of  rightness  in 
relation  to  the  “more”.  In  some  lower  forms  of 
religion  this  end  Is  sought  through  magic  and  witch¬ 
craft  as  well  as  propitiation.  The  attempt  Is  even 
made  to  reduce  the  gods  to  servitude,  as  the  genii  of 
the  Arabian  Nights  were  subject  to  the  possessor 
of  some  magic  lamp  or  ring.  But  however  this 
end  is  sought,  man  everywhere  discovers  at  a  very 
early  stage  of  his  social  and  religious  development 
that  there  is  In  human  life  a  disharmony  called  Sin, 
and  that  for  the  life  It  is  a  “pestilence  that  walketh 
In  darkness  and  a  destruction  that  wasteth  at  noom 
day”. 

The  religious  need  of  such  a  creature  Is  not 
merely  spiritual  development  and  communion  with 
God;  he  needs  redemption  and  atonement  and  regen¬ 
eration  and  reconcilatlon. 


Ill 


TTENCE  another  cognitive  element  emerges  in 
^  -Oman’s  higher  religious  experience,  namely,  the 
conviction  that  by  the  voluntary  evil  of  his  life  the 
equilibrium  of  the  spiritual  universe  has  been  dis¬ 
turbed  and  must  be  restored  to  avoid  moral  chaos. 

Sin  is  primarily  an  individual  matter.  There 
is  a  true  light  that  lighteth  every  man  that  cometh 
into  the  world.”  It  does  not  light  the  same  path  of 
duty  for  all  men.  Abel  must  offer  a  bloody  sacri¬ 
fice,  Abram  must  migrate,  Moses  must  legislate, 
Isaiah  must  prophesy,  Paul  must  evangelize.  But 
it  does  light  some  path  of  duty  for  every  man.  No 
life,  savage  or  civilized,  is  without  its  gleam  of  light 
and  truth.  God  has  not  left  himself  without  a  wit¬ 
ness  in  any  human  breast.  Every  rational  being 
knows  something  that  to  him  is  truth  and  which 
if  lived  will  make  his  life  nobler  and  richer.  An 
Apostle  speaking  of  the  basest  men  of  his  day,  said 
“They  hold  the  truth  in  unrighteousness.”  That 
is  to  say,  they  have  something  that  to  them  is  truth 
but^  they  are  not  true  to  their  truth,  not  loyal  to 
their  light.  Some  vision  of  some  virtue  floats  be¬ 
fore  every  life.  Some  ideal  beckons  every  heart 
to  heights  not  yet  attained.  Religious  duty  requires 
of  every  life  obedience  to  that  “heavenly  vision”. 
Fidelity  to  the  truth  as  one  sees  it  is  the  divine 
standard  for  human  life.  The  individual  must  walk 
in  the  light  as  he  sees  it,  must  live  true  to  the  truth 


35 


36  SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 

as  he  knows  it.  When  he  falls  below  this  divine 
ideal  he  misses  his  mark — he  “sins  and  comes  short 
of  the  glory  of  God”. 

Such  a  man  is  what  Prof.  Royce  calls  the  “ideal 
traitor”.  He  has  had  an  ideal  which  he  loved  with 
all  his  heart  and  soul  and  mind  and  strength  but  to 
which  in  some  voluntary  act  of  his  life  he  has  been 
deliberately  false.  His  ideal  is  betrayed.  His  trea¬ 
son  is  commited.  His  false  deed  is  done  and  can 
never  be  undone.  The  equilibrium  of  his  moral 
world  has  been  disturbed.  Can  it  be  restored? 

From  this  individualistic  point  of  view  the  ques¬ 
tion  of  .human  redemption — involving  atonement, 
regeneration,  reconciliation  and  so  forth — is  gener¬ 
ally  considered.  What  can  redemption  or  salvation 
mean  to  the  sinner  in  his  individual  relation  to  God? 

It  cannot  mean  the  annulment  of  his  sin.  That 
is  forever  impossible. 

It  cannot  mean  any  purely  external  service  per¬ 
formed  by  God  in  behalf  of  the  sinner.  That  is 
forever  inadequate. 

It  cannot  mean  mere  escape  from  the  penalty 
of  sin.  One  man  sentenced  to  prison  as  a  penalty 
for  crimes  secures  a  pardon  through  political  influ¬ 
ence,  and  escapes  the  penalty.  Another  man  sen¬ 
tenced  for  a  similar  crime,  serves  his  term  but 
through  the  religious  influence  in  the  prison,  comes 
out  a  “new  man” — changed  in  heart  to  live  a  new’ 
life.  One  convict  escapes  the  penalty  but  continues 
in  sin;  the  other  suffers  the  penalty  but  is  redeemed 
from  sin.  Which  man  is  saved? 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


37 


Salvation  from  sin  means  freedom  from  sin 
itself — from  its  power  and  practice.  It  involves 
repentance  and  regeneration,  and  without  such  a 
total  change  of  heart  the  divine  absolution  from 
guilt  is  impossible  in  any  case. 

But  this  change  of  heart  does  not  destroy  the 
guilt  of  the  individual’s  past  disloyalty  to  his  light. 
No  good  deeds  of  his  present  or  future  can  ever 
abolish  that  deed  of  disloyalty.  His  deliberate  act 
of  treason  is  part  of  himself.  For  that  deed  he  can¬ 
not  forgive  himself.  It  introduces  disharmony  into 
his  spiritual  world  and  separates  between  him  and 
his  God.  His  need  of  salvation,  therefore,  is  his 
need  of  atonement  that  shall  somehow  reconcile 
him  to  himself,  to  his  past  disloyalty  to  his  light  and 
to  his  God.  All  this  is  essentially  involved  in  any 
adequate  conception  of  individualistic  atonement. 

The  subject  is  the  more  complex  if  we  suppose 

the  individual’s  sin  to  have  assumed  a  social  aspect _ 

becoming  crime,  involving  his  fellows  in  the  conse¬ 
quences,  severing  human  ties,  destroying  brotherly 
love,  and  wounding  the  community  to  its  heart. 
Can  any  atonement  restore  the  equilibrium  to  such 
a  disturbed  spiritual  universe?  Nothing  short  of 
this  can  ever  satisfy  the  enlightened  ethical  sense 

of  man,  to  say  nothing  of  the  perfect  holiness  of 
God. 

In  his  “Idylls  of  the  King”  Tennyson  pictures 
Arthur  beginning  his  reign  with  a  noble  ideal  and  a 
just  and  prosperous  kingdom.  All  goes  well  until 
the  queen  falls  a  victim  to  her  guilty  love  for  Laun- 
celot.  The  result  is  “Red  ruin  and  breaking  up  of 


38 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


laws”.  Arthurs  ideal  is  shattered.  His  kingdom 
is  rent  by  civil  war  and  overrun  by  barbarians.  The 
queen  flees  to  a  convent.  There  the  king  visits  her 
before  his  last  fateful  battle  of  the  West.When 
Guinevere  hears  the  sound  of  his  mailed  feet  along 
the  halls  she  falls  in  deep  repentance  upon  the 
floor.  The  king  in  noblest  manhood  and  deepest 
love  says, 

“Lo!  I  forgive  thee,  as  Eternal  God 
Forgives;  do  then  for  thine  own  soul  the  rest. 

*  *  ♦ 


I  cannot  touch  thy  lips,  they  are  not  mine. 

*  *  * 

I  cannot  take  thy  hand ;  that  too  is  flesh 

And  in  the  flesh  thou  has  sinned ;  and  mine  own  flesh 

Here  looking  down  on  thine  polluted,  cries 

‘I  loathe  thee’;  yet  not  less,  O  Guinevere, 

For  I  was  ever  virgin  save  for  thee, 

My  love  through  flesh  hath  wrought  into  my  life 
So  far  that  my  doom  is,  I  love  thee  still. 

The  king  loves  Guinevere.  He  forgives  her  in  the 
sense  in  which  Royce  defines  forgiveness — “An  af¬ 
fectionate  remission  of  penalty.”  Yet  he  cannot 
take  her  to  his  heart  in  one  last  embrace  before 
his  death,  even  tho’  she  is  repentant  and  delivered 
from  the  power  of  sin.  Why  not?  Because  holy 
love  cannot  ignore  moral  consequences.  “An  af¬ 
fectionate  ren^ission  of  penalty”  does  not  atone  for 
the  irrevocable  crime  and  its  attendant  ills. 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


39 


“The  forgiveness  of  sins”  considered  in  its 
broad  social  and  ethical  bearings  is  thus  seen  to 
involve  tremendous  issues.  Absolution  from  guilt 
is  not  the  easy  sentimental  nod  of  the  head  or  wink 
of  the  eye  it  is  too  often  supposed  to  be. 

Dr.  Leidham  Green  in  his  word  on  “The  Steril¬ 
ization  of  the  Hands”  shows  the  extreme  difficulty, 
yea,  the  utter  impossibility  of  cleansing  the  hands 
of  bacteria.  Washing  with  hot  water  and  soap — 
using  sand  or  marble  dust — does  not  avail.  Turpen¬ 
tine,  benzoline,  alcoholic  disinfection  and  various 
antiseptics  equally  fail  to  render  the  hands  surgically 
clean.  In  fact  the  more  the  rubbing,  the  larger  the 
swarm  of  bacteria  aroused.  This  quest  for  physi¬ 
cal  purity  is  a  vivid  metaphor  of  the  impossibility 
of  cleansing  the  hands  from  the  stain  of  sin  by  any 
facile  absolution. 

Pilate  “took  water  and  washed  his  hands  before 
the  multitude,  saying,  I  am  innocent  of  the  blood  of 
this  righteous  man.”  But  guilt  will  not  thus  easily 
wash  off. 

Macbeth  says,  “Will  all  great  Neptune’s  ocean 
wash  his  blood  clean  from  my  hands?  No;  this  my 
hand  will  rather  the  mulutitudinous  seas  incarnadine, 
making  the  green  one  red.”  So  Lady  Mecbeth  rises 
in  her  sleep  and  stands  rubbing  her  hands,  seeming 
thus  to  wash  them  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour  at  a  time. 

“Yet,”  says  she,  “here’s  a  spot . Here’s  the  smell 

of  the  blood  still :  all  the  perfumes  of  Arabia  will 
not  sweeten  this  little  hand.” 

The  forgiveness  of  sins”  (used  here  as  synon¬ 
ymous  with  salvation  or  reconciliation)  must  include 


40 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


not  only  the  sinner’s  cure  of  his  sin — his  spiritual 
transformation,  embracing  repentance  and  regener¬ 
ation  as  we  saw  above:  but  must  provide  atonement 
to  reconcile  him  to  the  memory  of  his  sin  and  its 
consequence.  Macbeth  instinctively  feels  that  his 
treason-crammed  memory  presents  a  tremendous 
obstacle  to  his  peace.  So  he  cries  to  his  physician, 

Can  St  thou  not  minister  to  a  mind  diseas’d, 

Pluck  from  the  memory  a  rooted  sorrow, 

Raze  out  the  written  troubles  of  the  brain. 

And  with  some  sweet  oblivious  antidote 
Cleanse  the  stuff  d  bosom  of  that  perilous  stuff 
Which  weighs  upon  the  heart  ?” 

Consider  this  question  in  the  light  of  George 
Eliot  s  portrayal  of  Adam  Bede.  Bede,  a  strong, 
noble-minded  carpenter,  loves  Hetty  Sorrel,  and  pro¬ 
poses  to  make  her  his  wife.  Arthur  Donnithorne, 
heir  to  the  estate  of  Hayslope,  conceives  a  passing 
fancy  for  Hetty  and  works  her  ruin.  Hetty’s  suf¬ 
ferings,  the  birth  of  her  child,  her  wanderings,  her 
attempt  to  abandon  the  baby,  her  sentence  to  death 
for  child-murder,  are  vividly  portrayed. 

Arthur’s  remorse  is  intense  when  he  hears  of 
Hetty’s  plight.  He  sets  himself  to  do  what  he  can 
to  repair  the  wrong  and  succeeds  in  having  Hetty’s 
sentence  commuted  to  exile. 

Then  Arthur  and  Adam  meet.  Adam’s  wrath 
IS  just  and  righteous.  Adam  has  been  deeply  in¬ 
jured.  Poor  Hetty,  his  promised  bride,  has  been 
cast  body^  and  soul  into  an  unlighted  abyss  of  woe. 
The  equilibrium  of  the  moral  universe  has  been  dis- 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


41 


turbed.  Any  facile  absolution  of  Arthur’s  guilt,  so 
far  from  being  commendable,  would  throw  the 
whole  ethical  order  of  the  world  into  utter  chaos. 
The  very  thought  of  such  possibilty  outrages  the 
deepest  instinct  of  the  human  soul.  A  gospel  which 
tells  the  sinner  how  to  escape  from  the  rapids,  where 
the  victims  of  his  sins  are  still  struggling  hopelessly, 
and  promises  him  celestial  joy  with  no  smoking  Sinai 
in  his  memory  is  a  gospel  of  deception.  But  when 
Adam  sees  the  marks  of  suffering  in  Arthur’s  face 
and  learns  of  his  determination  to  make  every  satis¬ 
faction  within  his  power,  even  exiling  himself  from 
Hayslope  rather  than  have  Adam  and  his  friends 
forsake  the  place,  the  heart  of  the  carpenter  is  touch¬ 
ed,  and  he  extends  his  hand  in  forgiveness. 

That  forgiveness  is  the  “affectionate  remission 
of  penalty”.  Without  such  unmistakable  evidence 
of  repentance,  even  such  forgiveness  would  not  have 
been  possible.  And  though  Adam  gives  his  .heart 
with  his  hand  in  forgiveness,  yet  he  says  to  Arthur, 
“There’s  a  sort  of  damage  done.  Sir,  that  cannot  be 
made  up  for.”  No  human  efforts  can  atone  for  it. 
That  is  the  havoc  wrought  in  the  lives  and  hopes  of 
others. 

So  in  “Paradise  Lost”  Milton  represents  Adam 
as  repenting  when  he  sees  his  sin  in  the  light  of  its 
destructive  effects  on  his  descendants.  His  sorrow 
is  not  so  much  for  his  personal  loss  as  for  the  far- 
reaching  misery  entailed  upon  others. 

Man  must  have  an  atonement  not  merely  for 
sin  in  himself,  but  for  its  memory  and  its  conse¬ 
quences.  Anything  less  than  this  is  an  incomplete 


42 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


reconciliation  of  man  to  his  spiritual  universe.  Is 
such  atonement  possible? 

Prof.  Royce  says,  *‘Could  any  possible  new 
deed,  done  by,  or  on  behalf  of  the  community  and 
done  by  some  one  who  is  not  stained  by  the  traitor’s 
deed,  introduce  into  this  human  world  an  element 
which  as  far  as  it  went  could  be,  in  whatever  mea¬ 
sure,  genuinely  reconciling?” 

His  answer  is  that  a  triumph  over  treason  can 
be  accomplished  on  behalf  of  the  community  by  some 
faithful  and  suffering  servant  of  the  community 
thus:  “first,  by  a  deed  or  various  deeds  for  which 
only  just  this  treason  furnishes  the  opportunity;  and 
secondly,  the  world  as  transformed  by  this  creative 
deed,^  is  better  than  it  would  have  been  had  all  else 
remained  the  same,  but  had  that  deed  of  treason  not 
been  done  at  all.  That  is,  the  new  creative  deed 
has  made  the  new  world  better  than  it  was  before 
the  blow  of  treason  fell.” 

Thus  Milton’s  Adam  must  be  assured  not  only 
of  his  own  pardon,  but  “from  his  eyes  the  film  is 
removed  by  three  drops  from  the  well  of  life  instill¬ 
ed”  and  he  beholds  the  unfolding  grace  of  God  in 
redemption  until 

“He  who  comes  thy  Saviour,  shall  recure 

Not  by  destroying  Satan,  but  his  works 

In  thee  and  in  thy  seed.” 

In  the  rapturous  vision  of  Christ’s  perfect  vic¬ 
tory  over  sin  in  Paradise  Regained,  Adam  descended 
“greatly  in  peace  of  thought”. 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


43 


Christ  on  the  Cross  in  a  picture  of  divine  love 
suffering  for  sin.  But  the  vision  of  Christ  on  the 
cross  must  be  supplemented  by  the  furthur  vision 
of  Christ  on  the  throne.  Not  only  the  suffering  of 
love  but  the  victory  of  love  is  essential  to  our  sense 
of  reconciliation.  Evil  must  be  overcome  of  good. 
The  wounds  caused  by  our  sins  must  be  healed. 
The  scales  of  justice  must  be  balanced.  The  equili¬ 
brium  of  the  moral  order  must  be  restored.  Antag¬ 
onistic  forces  must  be  reconciled  in  the  complete 
triumph  of  the  goodness  of  God.  The  discord  in¬ 
troduced  by  treason  into  the  music  of  the  earth  must 
become  to  our  ear  a  great  minor  chord  serving  only 
to  enrich  the  harmony  of  the  universal  oratorio. 

All  this  is  involved  in  the  reconciliation  of  the 
“traitor”  to  the  spiritual  universe.  “No  baseness 
or  cruelty  of  treason  so  deep  or  so  tragic  shall  enter 
our  human  world  but  that  loyal  love  shall  be  able 
in  due  time  to  oppose  to  just  that  deed  of  treason 
its  fitting  deed  of  atonement.”  Even  so,  in  the  poetry 
of  the  Millenium,  “The  wolf  shall  dwell  with  the 
lamb  and  the  leopard  shall  lie  down  with  the  kid, 
and  the  calf  and  the  young  lion  and  the  fading  to¬ 
gether;  and  a  little  child  shall  lead  them — And  the 
suckling  child  shall  play  on  the  hole  of  the  asp,  and 
the  weaned  child  shall  put  his  hand  on  the  adder  s 
den.  They  shall  not  hurt  nor  destroy  in  all  my 
holy  mountain — for  the  earth  shall  be  full  of  the 
knowledge  of  the  Lord  as  the  waters  cover  the  sea.” 

Out  of  what  has  been  said  above  emerges  logi¬ 
cally  the  last  element  we  shall  consider. 


IV 


ECONCILIATION  to  God — true  articulation 

with  one’s  spiritual  universe — carries  with  it 
satisfaction  to  one’s  total  concrete  religious  con¬ 
sciousness. 

The  concrete  religious  consciousness  represents 
rnore  than  the  intellectual  element  in  the  conscious 
life  of  man.  It  includes  the  whole  energy  of  man 
as  a  rational  spirit.  It  is  emotional  as  well  as  intel¬ 
lectual  and  ethical  as  well  as  emotional. 

There  can  be  no  religion  without  thought. 
Only  as  man  conceives  an  object  can  he  have  any 
relation  to  it.  Not  to  be  related  to  some  object 
recognized  as  divine  is  to  have  no  religion. 

There  can  be  no  religion  without  emotion. 
Thought  and  feeling  are  inseparable.  Man  can 
have  no  feeling  of  dependence  without  a  conception 
of  something  or  someone  on  whom  he  depends. 

There  can  be  no  religion  without  conscience. 
Conscience  is  a  combination  of  thought  and  feeling 
— of  the  knowledge  of  good  from  evil  and  the  sense 
of  obligation  to  choose  the  one  and  eschew  the  other. 

Thus  religious  faith  involves  the  combined  ac¬ 
tivity  of  thought,  emotion,  and  conscience.  Elim¬ 
inate  thought  and  nothing  remains  but  mechanical 
action.  Remove  emotion  and  thought  arouses  no 
response.  Take  away  conscience  and  thought  is  not 
translated  into  life.  The  concrete  religious  con¬ 
sciousness,  therefore,  is  a  function  of  the  entire  man. 


44 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


45 


So  long  as  any  of  the  fundamental  interests 
of  man  s  nature  are  overlooked  there  can  be  no  last¬ 
ing  satisfaction  for  his  religious  consciousness. 
These  fundamental  interests  are  outlined  and  com¬ 
bined  by  Jesus  in  a  single  sentence.  “If  you  know 
these  things  happy  are  ye  if  ye  do  them.”  “If  ye 
know  that  is  the  head.  “Happy  are  ye” — that  is 
the  heart.  “If  ye  do  them” — that  is  the  hand,  the 
will,  the  conscience.  Head,  Hand,  Heart,  know, 
do,  enjoy.  To  the  head  the  universe  must  be  con¬ 
stitutionally  rational.  To  the  heart  it  must  be  he- 
nevolent.  To  the  will  it  must  insure  the  triumph  of 
eternal  goodness. 

Sometimes  in  the  historic  development  of  reli¬ 
gious  faith  the  head  gains  a  temporary  ascendency. 
Religion  then  becomes  intellectual  and  the  great 
creeds  are  born.  At  other  times  the  heart  occupies 
the  throne.  Religion  then  becomes  emotional  and 
great  revivals  ensue.  Again  the  hand  holds  the 
reins  and  religion  runs  out  into  great  sacrifices  and 
benevolences.  When  the  intellect  denies  full  re¬ 
ligious  rights  to  the  heart,  it  is  soon  compelled  to 
do  its  work  over  again.  When  no  sufficient  place 
is  left  in  religion  for  the  intellect,  it  soon  begins 
a  ciusade  for  recognition.  While  no  theological  sys¬ 
tem  is  secure  whose  conception  of  God  the  moral 
nature  cannot  approve. 

Thus  religion  always  reflects  the  stage  of  men¬ 
tal  and  moral  development  attained  by  an  individual 
or  a  community.  The  consciousness  of  God  is 
bound  up  with  man’s  very  life  and  that  consciousness 
he  is  compelled  to  express  in  some  way  even  in  his 


46 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


most  childish  stage.  From  the  lips  of  Philipps 
Brooks,  Hellen  Keller  received  her  first  clear  mes¬ 
sage  concerning  God.  “O  I  knew  all  that”,  she  said, 
“but  I  did  not  know  what  to  call  Him.”  He  whom 
in  her  physical  blindness,  deafness,  and  dumbness 
she  had  worshipped  in  comparative  ignorance,  was 
then  made  known  unto  her  as  God  the  Father  Al¬ 
mighty. 

Ihe  divine  Being  has  been  conceived  in  most 
different'  ways — as  many  and  as  one,  as  natural  and 
as  spiritual,  as  particular  and  as  universal.  In  re¬ 
ligion  as  in  other  things,  such  as  chemistry  and  as¬ 
tronomy  and  architecture  and  music  and  painting  the 
primitive  were  the  rudest  and  crudest  forms.  Yet 
rude  and  crud^  as  they  were  they  were  the  expres¬ 
sion  of  what  was  then  highest  and  most  rational  in 
man  reaching  out  towards  what  was  highest  and 
most  rational  in  the  universe. 

An  English  trader  landed  in  Africa  and  tra¬ 
veled  at  great  expense  far  into  the  country  to  buy 
cattle  from'  a  native  chief.  The  chief  drove  the  cat¬ 
tle  a  hundred  miles  to  meet  the  trader.  Just  when 
they  rnet  the  chief  discovered  that  he  had  forgotten 
his  fetich.  No  plea  of  haste,  no  promise  of  reward, 
no  threat  to  depart,  nothing  could  induce  the  chief 
to  bargain  in  stock  without  his  fetich.  So  the  Eng¬ 
lishman  waited  for  days  until  the  runner  returned 
with  the  charm.  Shall  our  Christian  missionaries 
laugh  to  redicule  the  iporant  African’s  religion? 
No.  His  principle  is  right.  He  needs  larger  truth 
for  his  intellect  and  a  worthier  object  for  his  devo¬ 
tion.  When  he  gets  that,  when  he  leaves  his  ma- 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


47 


terial  fetich  and  finds  his  spiritual  God,  the  presence 
of  the  divine  Spirit  will  be  his  charm  and  he  will  not 
trade  cattle  without  God. 

The  awakened  spirit  of  man  in  its  struggle 
from  the  lowest  to  the  highest  religious  consciousness 
cannot  remain  satisfied  with  its  ruder  conceptions 
of  the  divine  Being.  The  thought  of  God  outgrows 
the  possibility  of  being  confined  to  any  object  what¬ 
ever;  and  man  rises  on  stepping  stones  of  his  dead 
conceptions  of  God  and  His  relations  to  the  universe 
to  higher  conceptions,  until  he  attains  satisfaction 
to  his  concrete  religious  consciousness  in  its  high¬ 
est  development. 

The  only  Deity  the  religious  faith  of  the  twen¬ 
tieth  century  can  accept  is  the  one  universal  Spirit 
who  is  manifested  at  different  levels  in  nature  and 
humanity.  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  says  in  his  Ec¬ 
clesiastical  Institutes,  “The  power  manifest  through¬ 
out  the  world  distinguished  as  material  is  the  same 
power  which  in  ourselves  wells  up  under  the  form  of 
consciousness— This  ^  gives  rather  a  spiritualistic 
than  a  materialistic  interpretation  to  the  universe.” 

How  then  is  God’s  relation  to  the  universe  to 
be  conceived? 

The  Jewish  religion  emphasized  the  thought 
of  God  as  entirely  transcending  the  world.  The 
stoic  philosophy  emphasized  the  immanence  of  God 
in  the  world  and  in  human  life.  The  Christian  re¬ 
ligion  in  its  symbolism  of  the  “Trinity”  combines 
in  its  conception  of  God’s  relation  to  the  universe 
the  ideas  of  His  transcendence  and  His  immanence. 


48 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


By  the  transcendence  of  God  is  meant  that  he 
exceeds,  excels,  transcends  the  universe.  He  is 
over  all  things,  blessed  forevermore.  “In  the  be¬ 
ginning  He  created  the  heavens  and  the  earth.” 
“Before  the  mountains  were  brought  forth  or  ever 
the  earth  and  sea  were  formed,  even  from  everlast¬ 
ing  to  everlasting  Thou  art  God.” 

The  danger  in  the  doctrine  of  the  divine  transcend¬ 
ence  is  that  of  isolating  God  from  his  world.  So 
the  deist  represents  God  as  creating  the  world  and 
winding  it  up  as  a  clock  and  going  oh  to  the  peri¬ 
phery  to  watch  it  spin.  The  weights  and  springs 
and  wheels  and  cogs  and  face  and  hands  constitute 
the  clock  and  deterrriine  its  operations.  In  the  uni¬ 
verse  the  laws  of  nature  constitute  the  weights  and 
springs  and  cogs  and  wheels.  As  there  is  no  place 
in  the  operation  of  the  clock  for  the  clock  maker, 
so  there  is  no  place  in  the  course  of  nature  for  God. 
God  becomes  an  Absentee  from  His  world,  exiled  by 
His  own  creatures.  Divine  providence  becomes  an 
impossibility  and  prayer  an  absurdity. 

Under  the  power  of  deistic  thought  men  speak 
of  God  as  the  source  of  all  reality,  yet  attribute 
independent  existence  to  all  modes  of  being.  They 
call  God  infinite,  yet  over  against  Him  they  set  a  sep¬ 
arate  and  finite  world.  As  Spinoza  says,  “At  one 
time  they  affirm  the  reality  of  the  finite,  and  at 
another  time  the  reality  of  the  infinite,  but  rarely 
bring  the  two  together  and  face  the  problem,  how 
there  can  be  a  finite  which  is  independent  of  the  In¬ 
finite  or  an  infinite  which  is  independent  of  the  finite.” 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


49 


Such  an  opposition  of  independent  existences  ren¬ 
ders  the  conception  of  both  essentially  finite. 

In  the  recoil  of  thought  from  deism  the  rela¬ 
tion  of  God  to  the  universe  is  defined  by  the  term 
immanence.  By  the  immanence  of  God  is  meant 
that  he  is  not  beyond  the  world  but  rather  the  all- 

pervasive  soul  of  the  (world.  He  is  in  all  things, 
blessed  forever. 

When  the  universe  was  conceived  as  small  it 
was  easy  to  localize  God  in  a  dwelling  place  some¬ 
where  beyond  the  limits.  But  to-day  we  can  ima¬ 
gine  nothing  beyond  the  limits  of  the  universe.  To 
localize  God  beyond  such  limits  has,  therefore,  be¬ 
come  an  impossible  thought. 

If  we  are  to  think  of  God  as  anywhere  we 
must  think  of  Him  as  everywhere.  Thus  certain 
hilltop  men,  like  the  Psalmists,  caught  glimpses  of 
the  divine  omnipresence  in  an  age  whose  thought 
localized  God  in  some  distant  heaven: 

“Whither  shall  I  go  from  Thy  Spirit? 

Or  whither  shall  I  flee  from  Thy  presence  ? 

If  I  ascend  up  into  Heaven,  TThou  art  there  j 
If  I  make  my  bed  in  Sheol,  behold,  Thou  art  there ; 

If  I  take  the  wings  of  the  morning. 

And  dwell  in  the  uttermost  parts  of  the  sea. 

Even  there  shall  Thy  hand  lead  me. 

And  Thy  right  hand  shall  hold  me.” 

Once  men  thought  of  God  as  separated  from 
His  world,  governing  it  from  without.  But  now  it 
has  become  apparent  to  all  students  of  the  subject 
that  the  universe  is  operated  from  within.  The 


50 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


forces  that  are  found  at  work  are  resident  forces, 
existing  and  acting  within  the  system.  If  God  is 
the  operant  force  of  the  universe  and  it  is  operated 
from  within,  then  He  is  within  with  His  operative 
will  and  energy.  So  we  no  longer  think  of  God 
as  building  up  the  universe  as  the  engineer  builds 
an  engine,  but  rather  as  the  engineer  builds  up  his 
own  body — a  construction  from  within  from  the  cen¬ 
tral  germ  of  life  in  the  tiniest  cell  of  protoplasm  to 
the  full  grown  body  with  the  pervasive  and  dominat¬ 
ing  soul.  Thus 

“Earth  is  crammed  with  heaven, 

And  every  common  bush  alive  with  God.” 

God  is  not  an  Absentee.  He  is  not  the  Great 
First  Cause.  He  is  not  a  celestial  Mechanic  who 
built  the  universe,  equipped  it  with  natural  laws, 
hurled  it  out  into  motion  in  space  and  now  and  then 
interferes  with  its  movements  just  to  reveal  His  con¬ 
tinued  oversight.  God  is  the  One  Great  Eternal 
Underlying  Ground  of  all  existence  in  Heaven  and 
in  earth. 

The  great  musician  is  as  much  the  cause  of 
the  last  note  in  the  rendition  of  the  symphony  as  he 
is  of  the  first.  The  first  note  struck  does  not  cause 
the  second,  nor  the  second  the  third.  The  soul  of 
the  musician  is  the  underlying  ground  of  the  entire 
production.  So  He  who  in  the  first  spring  of  creation 
caused  the  earth  to  bring  forth  “herbs  bearing  fruit 
after  their  kind,”  has  been  the  cause  of  every  a- 
wakening  of  life  in  creation  since.  If  in  the  begin- 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


51 


ning  He  separated  the  ^waters  above  the  firmament 
from  the  waters  below  the  firmament”  every  falling 
raindrop  bears  upon  its  face  the  evidence  that  the 
same  separating  Power  still  operates.  If  in  the 
beginning  He  “formed  man’s  body  from  the  dust  of 
the  earth  and  breathed  into  him  the  breath  of  life 
till  man  became  a  living  soul,”  bearing  the  image  and 
likeness  of  God,  even  so  has  every  babe  since  Adam 
owed  its  life  to  the  same  creative  Power. 

We  are  in  the  presence  of  an  infinite  and  Eter¬ 
nal  Energy  from  which  all  things  proceed.” 

“From  Him  and  through  Him  and  unto  Him 
are  all  things.” 

“He  upholds  all  things  by  the  word  of  His 
power.” 

God  is  not  only  immanent  in  nature  but  also 
in  human  nature.  Because  he  manifests  Himself  in 
the  life  of  humanity,  we  see  the  human  race  develop- 
ing  from  its  infantile  beginning  toward  a  future  of 
unspeakable  glory — to  the  “manifestations  of  the 
sons  of  God.”  “One  thing  history  makes  sure,” 
says  Matthew  Arnold,  “that  there  is  a  power  not 
ourselves  that  makes  for  righteousness.”  That 
power  “works  within  man  both  to  will  and  to  do 
His  good  pleasure.”  The  ultimate  triumph  of  the 
good,  therefore,  is  not  assured  of  attainment  regard¬ 
less  of  man’s  desire  and  cooperation.  But  the  fact 
of  man  s  spirituality  and  his  inalienable  divine  in¬ 
heritance  renders  him  forever  incapable  of  perma¬ 
nent  satisfaction  with  anything  less  than  the  univer¬ 
sal  triumph  of  righteousness. 


52 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


> 

So  the  Christian  religion  “recognizes  that  God 
is  neither  beyond  the  world  nor  simply  the  all-perva¬ 
sive  soul  of  the  world;  but  is  essentially  self-mani¬ 
festing,  while  remaining  eternally  self-identical  in 
this  self-manifestation.”  The  fullness  of  God  is 
not  exhausted  in  His  manifestations.  He  exceeds, 
excels,  transcends  them  all.  On  the  other  hand  He 
is  not  a  Being  separated  from  the  world  in  which 
He  is  self-revealed,  but  the  spirit  operative  in  every 
part  of  the  world.  He  is  self-revealed  in  all  that 
exists  but  most  clearly  and  fully  revealed  in  the 
self-conscious  life  of  man.  As  we  know  more  of  the 
mind  and  heart  of  Tennyson  through  his  “In  Me- 
moriam”  than  through  his  construction  of  a  kite,  so 
we  have  a  higher  manifestation  of  God  in  the  moral 
nature  of  man  than  in  the  material  order  of  the 
world.  We  bear  His  “image  and  likeness.”  Hence 
we  come  to  conceive  of  God  as  self-conscious  Be- 
ing.  “God  is  spirit.”  He  is  the  Universal  Spirit 
manifesting  Himself  on  different  levels  in  the  na¬ 
tural  law  of  the  material  world  and  in  the  moral 
law  of  the  spiritual  world.  Thus  the  v/orld  and  man 
are  “Everywhere  bound  by  gold  chains  about  the 
feet  of  God.”  No  device  is  needed  to  bring  together. 
God  and  His  world.  They  have  never  been  sep¬ 
arated.  “What  God  hath  joined  together  let  no 
man  put  asunder.” 

We  have  seen  that  the  danger  in  the  doctrine 
of  the  divine  transcendence  is  that  of  isolating  God 
from  His  world.  On  the  other  hand  the  danger  in 
the  doctrine  of  the  divine  immanence  is  that  of 
identifying  God  with  His  word.  As  the  one  may 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


53 


be  deceived  into  deism,  so  the  other  may  be  seduc¬ 
ed  into  pantheism. 

It  is  one  thing  to  say  that  God  is  in  the  world; 
it  is  a  very  different  thing  to  say  that  God  is  the 
world  or  the  world  is  God.  It  is  true  that  the 
highest  life  of  man  cannot  be  realized  when  sever¬ 
ed  from  the  life  of  God,  but  it  is  not  true  that  union 
with  the  life  of  God  negates  man’s  distinction  from 
God  or  destroys  his  consciousness  of  himself. 

In  our  thought  of  the  divine  being  and  His  re¬ 
lation  to  the  universe  we  must  preserve  and  com¬ 
bine  the  transcendence  of  deism  and  the  im¬ 
manence  of  pantheism.  This  can  only  be  done 
through  the  conception  of  God  as  the  universal  self- 
conscious  Spirit  who  manifests  Himself  on  different 
levels  in  the  world  and  in  man.  He  is  the  “Infi¬ 
nite  and  Eternal  Energy”  that  thinks  and  feels  and 
purposes  and  executes.  He  is  the  “power  not  our¬ 
selves  that  works  for  righteousness.” 

“By  Him  were  all  things  made.” 

“By  Him  all  things  subsist.” 

We  are  also  his  offspring.  He  is  not  far  from 
any  one  of  us;  in  Him  we  live  and  move  and  have 
our  being.” 

And  so  we  can 

“Speak  to  Him  for  He  hears, 

And  Spirit  with  spirit  can  meet; 

Closer  is  He  than  breathing, 

And  nearer  than  hands  or  feet.” 

Such  a  union  with  the  living  God  satisfies  not  mere¬ 
ly  the  intellectual  and  ethical  but  also  the  emotional 
nature  of  man. 


54 


SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 


Man  needs  God  as  a  “Present  Help  in  time 
of  trouble.” 

“Blessed  is  the  man  whose  strength  is  in  Thee: 

In  whose  heart  are  the  highways  of  Zion.” 

The  birds  hide  themselves  from  the  thunder  clouds. 
When  the  light  above  the  clouds  begins  to  appear 
along  their  edges  it  calls  out  the  birds  again.  What 
if  there  were  no  light  above  the  cloud?  Then  the 
cloud  of  sorrow  has  no  golden  edge  and  there  are 
no  joyous  birds  to  sing.  But  since  “God  reigns  let 
the  earth  rejoice.” 

Man  needs  God  in  the  joy  of  life.  In  buoyant 
health  you  rise  early  some  morning  and  go  out  to 
,  sniff  the  fragrance,  see  the  beauty  and  hear  the  har¬ 
monies  of  nature.  You  are  in  jubilant  spirits. 
Your  heart  overflows  with  gratitude.  In  such 
moments  of  joy  your  entire  being  cries  out  for  the 
living  God.  Love  demands  expression.  You  need 
someone  to  thank  for  all  this  manifestation  of  good¬ 
ness.  The  completion  of  your  happiness  requires 
that  you  give  thanks  to  the  Giver  of  such  gifts. 

Some  time  ago  in  a  disaster  in  the  Pennsyl¬ 
vania  mines  several  men  were  buried  alive.  Res¬ 
cuers  worked  eighteen  days  and  nights  to  open  the 
subterranean  prison  before  giving  up  all  hope. 
Just  when  they  were  ready  to  throw  down  their  tools 
in  despair  someone  discovered  what  seemed  to  be 
foot  prints.  Could  those  men  be  alive  still?  They 
took  up  pick  and  spade  and  soon  reached  the  open¬ 
ing  where  the  men  were  imprisoned.  A  shout  of 
joy  ascended.  The  men  were  alive.  The  glad  tid- 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


55 


ings  were  made  known  to  the  friends  above.  The 
news  spread  and  the  entire  community,  thrilled  with 
gladness,  gathered  at  the  mine  to  welcome  the  lost 
back  to  life.  Three  thousand  people  stood  waiting, 
all  swayed  by  the  same  emotion.  When  the  res¬ 
cued  men  were  brought  to  the  surface  that  vast 
crowd  with  one  impulse  began  singing  “Praise  God 
from  Whom  all  Blessings  Flow.”  Professed  in¬ 
fidels  were  there.  Scoffers  were  there.  The  non¬ 
religious  were  there.  But  in  every  heart  was  grat¬ 
itude  and  to  express  that  emotion  they  needed  a 
praise-hearing  God  and  a  Christian  hymn  I 

“Love  to  that  which  is  eternal  and  infinite,” 
says  Spinoza,  “Feeds  the  soul  with  unmingled  joy, 
a  joy  untainted  with  any  sorrow.  This  we  ought  to 
desire  and  seek  after  with  all  our  powers.” 

Only  in  union  with  God  can  the  total  concrete 
religious  consciousness  of  man  be  satisfied.  Such 
union  is  the  open  secret  of  life’s  conscious  unity  and 
peace  and  power. 

Men  who  find  temporary  satisfaction  in  sen¬ 
sible  and  social  conditions  are  those  who  live  in 
such  a  healthy  surface  activity  as  prevents  reflec¬ 
tion.  They  are  children  who  know  neither  the 
*  world  nor  themselves.  If  once  their  spirit  opens 
its  eyes  and  catches  but  a  gleam  of  light  that  streams 
through  the  rift  in  the  clouds  of  its  sensible  firma¬ 
ment,  they  can  never  again  be  engrossed  by  the  sen¬ 
suous.^  In  his  religious  consciousness  man  becomes 
explicitly  aware  of  what  he  has  always  been  impli¬ 
citly  conscious,  namely,  that  his  true  life  is  to  be 
realized  only  in  union  with  the  Divine.  This  is  the 


56  SOME  COGNITIVE  ELEMENTS 

thought  of  Augustine’s  classic  utterance  in  the  first 
book  of  his  Confessions: — “Thou  madest  us  for 
Thyself,  and  our  heart  is  restless  until  it  rests  in 
Thee.” 

^  Whoever  thus  walks  with  God  feels  at  home 
in  his  Father’s  house  though  like  Enoch  he  dwell  in 
the  forest  primeval. 

Of  such  an  one  Job  said  “Thou  shalt  be  in 
league  with  the  stones  of  the  field  and  the  beasts 
of  the  field  shall  be  at  peace  with  thee.”  All  the 
great  reinforcing  powers  of  the  spiritual  world  are 
in  league  with  him  who  is  in  league  with  God. 

Thus  Browning  pictures  David  with  his  harp 
arousing  Saul  from  sinful  despair.  He  lifts  a  soul 
into  union  with  God.  Now  he  sees  a  new  face  on 
all  nature,  gets  a  new  view  of  life,  observes  the 
operation  of  a  new  law.  Old  things  pass  away  and 
behold  all  things  are  made  new.  So  David  says: 

I  know  not  too  well  how  I  found  my  way  home  in  the  night. 
There  were  witnesses,  cohorts  about  me,  to  left  and  to  right* 
Angels,  powers,  the  unuttered,  unseen,  the  alive.” 

David  walks  on  air  in  the  midst  of  the  spiritual 
universe  that  is  all  about  him. 

E  en  the  serpent  that  slid  away  silent, — he  felt  the  new 
Law. 

The  same  stared  in  the  white  humid  faces  upturned  by  the 
flowers ; 

The  same  worked  in  the  heart  of  the  cedar,  and  moved  the 
vine  bowers. 

And  the  little  brooks  witnessing,  murmured  persistent  and 
low. 

With  their  obstinate,  all  but  hushed  voices,  “E’en  so! 
it  is  so.” 


OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 


57 


“All  nations  know  that  it  is  the  religious  con¬ 
sciousness  in  which  they  possess  the  truth;  and  they 
have  therefore  regarded  their  religion  as  that  which 
gives  dignity  and  peace  to  their  lives.  All  that 
awakes  doubt  and  perplexity,  all  sorrow  and  care, 
are  limited  interests  of  finitude  we  leave  behind  on 
the  bark  and  shoal  of  time.’  And,  as  on  the  sum- 
rnit  of  a  mountain,  removed  from  all  hard  distinc¬ 
tion  of  detail,  we  calmly  overlook  the  limitations  of 
the  landscape  and  the  world,  so  by  religion  we  are 
lifted  above  all  the  obstructions  of  finitude.  In  re¬ 
ligion,  therefore,  man  beholds  his  own  existence  in 
a  transfigured  reflection,  in  which  all  the  divisions, 
all  the  crude  lights  and  shadows  of  the  world,  are 
softened  into  eternal  peace  under  the  beams  of  a 
spiritual  sun.  It  is  in  this  native  land  of  the  spirit 
that  the  waters  of  oblivion  flow,  from  which  it  is 
given  to  Psyche  to  drink  and  forget  all  her  sorrows; 
for  here  the  darkness  of  life  becomes  a  transparent 
dream-image,  through  which  the  light  of  eternity 
shines  in  upon  us.” — Hegel. 

Thus  man’s  concrete  rational  satisfaction 
grows  out  of  his  true  articulation  with  the  Univer¬ 
sal  Spirit. 

As  the  marsh-hen  builds  in  the  watery  sod, 

Behold,  I  will  build  me  a  nest  in  the  greatness  of  God, 

I  will  fly  in  the  greatness  of  God,  as  the  marsh-hen  flies, 
In  the  freedom  that  fills  all  the  space  ’twixt  the  marsh  and 
the  skies. 

By  so  many  roots  as  the  marsh-grass  sends  into  the  watery 
sod, 

I  will  heartily  lay  me  ahold  of  thft  greatness  of  God.” 


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